John Chowning was born in 1934 in Salem, New Jersey and studied violin and percussion (both of which he would make considerable use of) after a stint in the US Navy. The keyboard that gave a romantic sheen to A-Ha and was mastered by Brian Eno was also powered by one of the most valuable (non-pharma) research patents in history.įrequency modulation synthesis, or FM Synthesis, was discovered not by an engineer but a composer. In the case of the DX7, its rich, crystalline sounds were generated using a groundbreaking method of digital synthesis covered under patent. This is unheard of in the industry, where any new sound that catches the public’s ear is almost immediately cloned. Thanks to some clever engineering and even smarter licensing deals, Yamaha practically cornered the market on “owning” this sound for nearly 20 years.

When people mention a generalized “1980s sound,” they’re almost invariably talking about sounds made by this one keyboard: the Yamaha DX7. Its popularity by this point is almost a cliché: it sold more than 200,000 units, and its domination of the charts in the ’80s makes it more difficult to find Top 40 hits that didn’t include a DX7 after sorting through the hundreds that did. Yamaha’s DX7 was the first mass marketed synthesizer which was also used by professional musicians.

What the guitar was to rock, the DX7 was to a whole decade of music from a dozen different genres, taking root in ’80s pop and New Wave, seeding the new genres of house and techno and undermining even the guitar in its infiltration of popular music.

In the modern era of computer-generated and synthesized sound, it is unlikely there will ever again be an instrument as ubiquitous as the Yamaha DX7. Released in 1983 and still a part of music studios worldwide: the Yamaha DX7 is the very definition of a classic.

Dx7 patches 2016